Legislators asked for income details

Moreland Commission letter seeks information on outside earnings

By Rick Karlin

Updated 11:20 pm, Friday, September 6, 2013

Albany

The special commission designed to root out corruption at the intersection of money and politics has sent letters to lawmakers, asking them to list their clients and details of their work if they earned more than $20,000 in outside income last year.

The letter, reported by The Associated Press, was sent last month. The move comes as the Legislature is hiring its own outside counsel, hinting at a potential battle over whether lawmakers have to disclose details of their private employment.

Legislators, whose jobs technically are part time, earn a base salary of $79,500 but most get more for additional duties.

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Many also have outside income from work as lawyers, insurance agents, landlords or from government or military pensions.

Following a half-dozen corruption indictments in recent months, and after lawmakers rebuffed demands for ethics-related changes, Gov. Andrew Cuomo in July convened a Moreland Commission to explore the influence of money on political decisions.

The commission, which includes several district attorneys as well as Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, is named for the 1907 Moreland Act that allows the creation of such panels.

According to the AP report, the commission is seeking the names of lawmakers' clients or customers as well as details about how the money was earned.

Lawmakers have until Thursday to respond and the commission could issue subpoenas if they don't comply.

While the Moreland Commission is technically limited to investigating the executive branch, including state agencies, the connection between the Legislature and agencies is closer than is generally realized. That's because lawmakers in many ways mold and influence public policy, which is carried out by the state agencies.

According to earlier news reports, the Assembly has already hired an outside law firm to deal with "legitimate inquiries from the commission while preserving proper respect for the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers."

The Senate is said to be poised to hire a law firm, too, but hadn't yet done so.

A good deal of the focus from the letters is likely to fall on the lawyers in the Legislature.

According to an analysis by New York Public Interest Research Group, 130 of the state's 213 lawmakers earned at least $20,000 in outside income last year. Forty got at least one payment of that amount for legal work.

The AP reported that the Moreland Commission's letter asked for descriptions of the work that lawmakers did to earn their outside income, how the pay was determined, and in a move that seems aimed at lawyer/legislators, "a list of your clients in any civil matters or in any publicly filed criminal matters."

Among the lawyers earning outside incomes are Assembly Democratic Majority Speaker Sheldon Silver, who earned up to $450,000 at the Weitz and Luxenberg law firm, and Senate Republican Majority Leader Dean Skelos, who got up to $250,000 from another law firm, Ruskin Moscou Faltischek.

The letter requests more information than current ethics/disclosure laws require. Those laws demand posting a salary or income range but don't require details about clients and work that could reveal conflicts of interest.

Lawmakers who work as lawyers in the past have maintained that attorney-client confidentiality could prevent some of the disclosure and that issue could provoke a legal fight.

At least one observer, who has been critical of the Moreland Commission as well as the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, said that issue will likely throw a monkey wrench into the inquiry.

"They are asking for stuff that they know they are going to lose on," David Grandeau, director of the old state Lobbying Commission, said of the Moreland Commission's letter.

Among the concerns facing lawmakers was an aspect of the Moreland Commission that requires cases to be funneled through the State Police superintendent for potential criminal action.